David Preston
1967, exactly one year before his death.
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Significantly, King chose Harlem, a highly politicized and overwhelmingly Black area, to explain to skeptics why he had decided to move beyond the civil rights struggle to address the war in Vietnam and other “social justice” issues, which he viewed as being part of the same fight. This was Malcolm X’s old stomping ground, and by making the speech here, King was acknowledging that Malcolm had influenced him. (Malcolm had been assassinated just two years earlier, a couple miles from this location.)
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Theories abound on the left that King’s decision to intervene in national politics . . . and particularly the Vietnam war . . . was what really got him killed. Blacks were over-represented as front-line troops in Vietnam, and here was MLK, the most respected Black man of his time, telling the nation’s young Black men that the war was immoral.